America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
Marguerite Harrison said she traveled to Asia to gather material for her lectures and articles for Cosmopolitan magazine. But the reports she filed with the U.S. Army and State Department offer evidence that she was again on an intelligence mission. And this time she might have indeed played the role of Mata Hari luring unsuspecting …
Continue reading "British and Japanese attempt to recruit Marguerite"
In Japan, Marguerite for the first time began to seriously consider the roles of women in society. She had not advocated women’s suffrage in the United States or fought for equal treatment in the workplace. She had been America’s first female foreign intelligence officer, but it was a position she wanted for herself, not her …
In the middle of June 1922, less than a year after her release from Russian prison, Marguerite Harrison boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway train to Vancouver and days later caught a steamer bound for Yokohama, Japan. As soon as she arrived in Tokyo, the wary Japanese assigned an agent, Dr. Matsujiro Honda, to act as …
The circumstances surrounding Marguerite Harrison’s decision to travel to Asia are shrouded in the thick mist of time and the secrecy of the intelligence service. Marguerite later wrote that she decided to go to Asia because she was looking for fresh material for her lectures. She also wrote that she had contracted with Cosmopolitan magazine …
Once she settled in New York, she soon accepted several speaking engagements that took her to lecture halls throughout the Northeast and Midwest. During these appearances, Marguerite carefully avoided mention of her intelligence work. Once, when a woman in the audience asked about rumors that Marguerite had been a double agent, she replied coyly: “Don’t …
Continue reading "Marguerite Harrison: A woman of suspicion"
Marguerite found it difficult to adjust to life back in Baltimore. Baltimore Sun Editor Frank Kent offered her her old job back at the newspaper, and she accepted, hoping to rediscover the pleasure she once had covering Baltimore’s music and theater scene. But as the weeks passed, Marguerite felt increasingly alienated from those people and …
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Appearing before newspaper reporters in Riga and Berlin, Marguerite presented an image of a woman who had been inadvertently caught up in an international scandal. She made no mention of being an intelligence agent, but told reporters she had been arrested for entering the Russia illegally, for supplying British and American prisoners with unauthorized aid, …
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Marguerite stepped off the train in Riga still dressed in the clothes she had worn in prison—the crumpled khaki suit she had on the night she was arrested, a man’s shirt that a Jewish aid worker had given her, a cap she had fashioned from a shirt, and men’s shoes that were many sizes too …
Continue reading "Crowds — and old friends–greet Marguerite"
In early June Marguerite’s case went to the highest authority in Soviet Russia—Vladimir Lenin. Maryland Sen. Joseph France wrote to Lenin asking permission to enter Russia to discuss the release of the American prisoners in exchange for food aid. France, who was facing reelection in the fall, was especially eager to free one of his …
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Novinsky women’s prison, which had been built on the site of a former monastery seemed to Marguerite like a “terrestrial paradise.” The courtyard included grass plots with flowering shrubs and benches where women sat talking or sewing. Children of the inmates played in the dirt. In the middle of the courtyard was a small white …
Continue reading "Harrison encounters better conditions, but grows more ill"
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison 